Video of Tim Walz dancing in cowboy getup is deepfake | Fact check

A Sept. 5 Instagram video (archive link) shows a man wearing a cowboy outfit and glasses dancing in an elevator lobby.
“This is Kamala’s VP Running Mate, Tim Waltz (sic),” reads text in the video.
The post was liked more than 400 times in one day.
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The video has been digitally edited, an expert said. The face of the dancer was changed to resemble Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, the Democratic nominee for vice president. The original video also shows the dancer is not Walz.
Walter Scheirer, an engineering professor at the University of Notre Dame whose area of research includes visual recognition, said the Instagram video appeared to be a “very obvious face swap using a deepfake-like algorithm.”
“The face in the edited video is of very poor quality compared to other regions in the video, with blurring effects, missing frames, and lighting that is inconsistent with the rest of the scene,” Scheirer said in an email. “These are all characteristic markers of a poor quality deepfake.”
The original video, which was posted on Instagram in February, shows the dancer in the video is not Walz. The person in the original video is not wearing glasses.
Fact check: No, Tim Walz isn’t the cowboy dancer in this video
Walz’s likeness has been used like this before.
Social media users in August shared a similarly altered video that falsely claimed to show Walz dancing in a cowboy hat with dollar bills tucked into his belt. The video included similar characteristics of digital manipulation, such as visual artifacts appearing when the dancer’s hand passed in front of the face.
The Instagram user who shared the video did not provide any evidence to back up the claim when contacted by USA TODAY.
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